But Nancy McKeon, 15, can cry on cue and do just about everything else perfectly.
Early on a Thursday morning, in a rehearsal hall at Metromedia's Hollywood studios, Lisa Whelchel is corralling the cast and crew of NBC's The Facts of Life to share a revelation: Nancy McKeon is not perfect.
This comes as an authentic bulletin to the others on the series. At the age of 15. Nancy, after all, has already managed to amass a reputation as a gifted, determined actress who also: is working nights and weekends at fulfilling her promise as a singer and dancer; is a straight-A student; is precociously optioning novels for herself to star in; is athletic and blossoming into a superior physical specimen; is fiercely organized and self-disciplined; is even-tempered and unfailingly courteous; is uncommonly neat; and cooks (specialty: veal cutlet parmigiana) like nobody's business. And she goes to church every Sunday.
"It's enough to make you sick," says costar Whelchel, who plays Blair, the upper class boy-chaser who frequently tangles on the series with Nancy's character, Jo, the streetwise motor-cycle addict. "But I want everyone to know,"continues Lisa, "that I discovered an imperfection this morning. Racquetball. I beat her in racquetball. She hits her backhands with two hands, which in racquetball is wrong, wrong, wrong. But I am not going to tell her that. I'm just going to keep beating her and invite lots of people to come watch.
Lisa is joshing about her professed delight in discovering this defect; but from across the rehearsal hall, Mindy Cohn, 15, who plays good-hearted Natalie on the show, watches Nancy walk through the door and laments: "Look at her. It's 9 in the morning and she's in shorts and a sweatshirt and she's still a vision of loveliness. Meanwhile, I sit here looking crummy. She's even got great legs. Look at her. She claims to have a weight problem. She doesn't have a weight problem. I have a weight problem. Oh, God, she's a good friend, but she makes me crazy."
Nancy McKeon is the prototypical overachieving kid mothers point to and admonish their own children: "Why can't you be like that?" Certainly, Nancy's parents have no complaints. They gave her a foot in the door when she was just 2, and she's been running with the opportunity ever since, advancing with a vengeance from modeling to commercials to full-fledged acting. Her father, Don McKeon, who had his own travel agency in New York, was urged by a friend 13 years ago to take blond-haired, blue-eyed son Philip, who's two years older than Nancy (and who plays Linda Lavin's son on CBS's Alice), to an agency that placed kids in modeling assignments. So Barbara McKeon, the mother, took Philip in one day; and, since she couldn't get a baby sitter, Nancy went along. "The strange thing is that the agent went down the line at this cattle call and picked Nancy but not Philip," recalls Don McKeon. "Later Philip got into it, too; but honestly, if they'd both been turned down that first day, we'd never have pursued it beyond that."
Somehow, though, you get the feeling that Nancy would have found her way into the business anyway. On a Sunday afternoon, with no other work to do, she puts her 5-foot-5-inch frame through three and a half hours of frenzied jazz dancing in a sweltering studio. Cooling down from that, catching her breath, she says, "It's fair to say I'm obsessed with my career. I used to take ballet classes, but down the line I want to get my own television special, and jazz dancing is more practical for that than ballet. I'll do anything I can to make my career happen. If somebody doesn't agree with that approach, I'm sorry; that's just how I feel."
While growing up in the suburb of Forest Hills, N.Y., Nancy took all the jobs she could fit into her schedule, appearing regularly as a model in the pages of The New York Times and department store catalogues; doing commercials for bread, pizza, cereal and toothpaste, and acting in The Secret Storm, and other daytime soaps. "It was a blast." she says.
Then Philip landed his role in Alice and the family decided to move to Los Angeles, where Nancy confronted her first career crisis, wondering if she was a has-been at age 9. Maybe that's one reason she doesn't feel she can relax now that she's back in demand. "I got very discouraged for a while; it was like starting over." she says of the early L.A. years. "People out here didn't know me. I'd go on calls day after day after day for commercials, TV shows and movies, and nothing was coming from it."
Characteristically, she reacted by going on even more calls. Her persistence finally paid off with appearances on Starsky & Hutch and The Love Boat; as well as a part in "A Question of Love," a controversial TV-movie about lesbians, played by Gena Rowlands and Jane Alexander. Then Nancy's performance as a female Fonzie type in a pilot called "Dusty" convinced NBC executives and the producers of The Facts of Life last year that she was just the new girl they were looking for to play Jo, a tough cookie on the outside who occasionally exposes her vulnerability with a torrent of tears. ("They call me Faucet-face," says Nancy.) She was added to the revamped series, which is set in a girls' boarding school, at the start of its second season. Put in a slot following the popular Diff'rent Strokes that season, the show's ratings improved dramatically. "The producers and writers decided after the first season to go for more realistic scripts about teen-agers' concerns and problems," says Nancy, "and I think they've succeeded for the most part. My character's kind of a misfit, so I get a lot of letters from teen-agers who feel they're kind of alone themselves. One I'll never forget was from a girl who had tried to commit suicide. She saw our show about a girl who did kill herself, and wrote to say she'd realized from watching that she had to find somebody to talk to about her problems. And she did. It was very touching.
"Personally, I learned a lot about dealing with handicapped persons on the show we did with Geri Jewell [a comedienne actress], who has cerebral palsy. From that show, and working with Geri, I found out persons who are handicapped in one way or another would rather have you talk to them about it than just make assumptions that might be wrong and treat them differently.
Nancy has always attended Catholic schools, and now that she's in a series she crams a normal day's course load into three hours with a studio teacher. Kim Fields (Tootie), 12, is convinced her older colleague has a switch in her side that she pushes to "School" or "Acting" or "Play" as befits the occasion.
Play? You mean Nancy actually takes time out for something besides work? "Yeah," grins Mindy Cohn. "She can be weird, in fact. We both have warped senses of humor, and we'll tell each other jokes and crack up and everyone thinks we're so stupid. I'd tell you some of the jokes, but they're impossible to explain to the outside world." Other times, though, Mindy will start talking to Nancy "and she'll be concentrating so hard on something that it'll be five minutes before she pops her head up and says,'Oh, hi, what's going on?"'
Moments before a taping. Nancy is doing her concentration number as the cast gathers behind the set to be introduced to the audience. The other girls are whooping and hollering, relieving nervousness. Nancy, though, is off to the side, quietly getting focused on the job at hand. A reporter intrudes to ask if she's nervous. No, just concentrating.
After the taping, flipping her switch to "interview, " she talks more in the dressing room she sometimes shares with Lisa Whelchel. About how nice it is at 15 to have the clout to get a novel she likes optioned for what she hopes will become a network movie with her as the star: "It's called 'Starring Peter and Leigh.' It's about a girl whose mother remarries and the girl acquires a stepbrother who has hemophilia. He kind of falls in love with her. It's concerned with unusual relationships." About her tightknit family: "I keep a lot of stuff inside, but if I've really got something bothering me, I'll go to someone in the family to talk about it." About hitting the advanced age of 16 next April: "I'll get my driver's license then. I can't wait. I hate to be dependent on others to drive me around. Or anything else." About boys--but only when explicitly asked: "What can I say? I like them." Nancy giggles. ("I'm worried about that girl," confides Lisa later. "The rest of us on the show are boy-crazy. She does date occasionally, but when is she going to become normal and fall in love with a different guy every week like the rest of us?")
The reporter is worried, too. This McKeon girl is just too good to be true. There's got to be a crack in her image, something beyond a lousy racquetball backhand. Then Nancy herself suggests what it is. She is, she says, a compulsive overeater. "I either don't eat at all or I eat like crazy--and bad things."
As if to prove this, she goes through a caterer's buffet line before the second taping of the day, choosing her food sensibly enough until she comes to the brownies. Sweet, caloric, disgusting brownies. She stacks her plate with the things. "I can't help myself," she confesses. Then she marches to a table and -- complaining all the while that she shouldn't be succumbing, speculating that she'll wake up the next morning shaped like the Goodyear blimp-she lays waste to every last one of the brownies. So much for her inviolable self-discipline. And what a relief. The kid's human.